KINSELLA: Internet key in creating monsters like mass-killer Shamsud-Din Jabbar

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Texas born and raised. All-American.

U.S. Army veteran, too, and a member of the Army Reserve.  Senior information management officer in the Army. Army team leader and human resources supervisor. Member of Army Corps of Engineers. Honours graduate. U.S. Army combat training. And on and on.

How did Shamsud-Din Jabbar go from all that, from serving under the American flag, to murdering 10 people under the ISIS flag? How did he decide he would kill innocent New Year’s revellers with a rented truck in New Orleans in the early hours of 2025? How did he reach that point?

Those are questions that will be asked many times in the days ahead. Answers are so far elusive. Jabbar’s act of mass-murder happened just hours ago, so we don’t know yet the names of the websites the “senior information management officer” was frequenting. But we can hazard a guess.

They are likely the same websites and social media platforms favoured by the masked figures who have shot up and firebombed synangogues and Jewish schools multiple times in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver in the past year.  They all use the same source material, after all.

The only qualitative difference is that Shamsud-Din Jabbar was much more effective at spilling blood than his fellow monsters up here.

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Now, this writer does not ever profile mass-murderers, or even name them. The victims are the ones who deserve to be remembered, not their executioners.

But like Timothy McVeigh before him — another medalled U.S. Army veteran, who would go on to murder 168 men, women and children in Oklahoma City in April 1995 — Jabbar became radicalized somewhere along the way.  And, like McVeigh, he was American who had sworn allegiance with these words: “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.”

So how did Shamsud-Din Jabbar, having sworn an oath to defend the United States against all enemies, become one himself?

The internet, almost certainly, will be the reason.  Because the internet — social media platforms, mostly, but also old-fashioned internet platforms, like YouTube or websites — have been the recruitment office for Islamist terror groups for a generation. From al-Qaida to ISIS to Hamas and Hezbollah and back to ISIS again: the internet has provided terrorists — McVeigh’s neo-Nazis and Jabbar’s Islamists — with an abundant source of funds, recruits and public relations muscle.

Al-Qaida, ISIS and Hamas don’t merely use internet platforms — they actually are internet platforms themselves. On TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Discord and many other variants, Islamic terrorists address two distinct audiences.

One is found in the West, and they use horrifying images — Hamas slaughtering 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, or al-Qaida slaughtering 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001 — to terrorize us, often in English with slick production values.

The other audience is usually Arabic-speaking, and is found across the Ummah, the Muslim diaspora.

Those online words and images are designed to radicalize the likes of Shamsud-Din Jabbar.  To take them out of the world they grew up in, and to transport them to a darker and deadlier place, where Jews and non-believers are evil and the enemy.  And who deserve to be killed.

The European police agency, Europol, states that “the online environment plays a key role … it facilitates self-radicalization and the spread of terrorist propaganda.” The FBI agrees: “No matter the format, the message of radicalization spreads faster than we imagined just a few years ago.  Like never before, social media allows for overseas terrorists to reach into our local communities to target our citizens, as well as to radicalize and recruit.”

Which is almost certainly what happened with the former U.S. Army soldier, Shamsud-Din Jabbar.  Which is how the internet’s earliest manifestations — bulletin boards and Listservs — radicalized Timothy McVeigh, too. The internet took two American soldiers, and turned them against America.

These killers all use the same internet platforms and websites. They’re ubiquitous, online. You can access them right now, on the phone in your pocket. So, the obvious question: Can something like New Orleans happen in Canada?

Of course. The only surprise, really, isn’t that it hasn’t happened yet.